$17K dollar tax mistake

Posted on 3 February 2001

i love tax time.

i don’t know if it is because i know i generally always get money back or if it is the simple fact of number crunching (finding out interest rates or new tax laws), but i always love it when it’s time to do taxes.

every year i start a new folder for my files for that years taxes and start waiting for the W2s to come trickling in. For me, the year 2000 was easy as I only had one employer, UUNet. For Paul, since he swapped out three separate jobs (fucking Plexmedia claimed he work for two weeks in the first week of January) and because he hit above 80k a year (thanks to signing bonuses and moving expenses expenditures), there was the probability that we could owe taxes at the end of the year.

so we were expecting to pay out some money.

when all was said and done and i had gone through the whole itemized deduction list, paul ended up “owing” 14K to the IRS.

i cried. i blamed Plexmedia and andover.net for fucking up his deductions. i panicked thinking that we would be so poor, it would be unreal for us to get back on our feet again. i called paul into the office and showed him what i came up with using TurboTax. Paul started hyperventilating while I started crying.

14 fucking thousand dollars.

I dumped that return and started doing it over again in TurboTax. I kept watching my fingers as I typed (something i never do) to make sure there were no mistakes. As I typed, I watched the upper right hand corner in TurboTax, waiting for that surprise of owing 14K to the IRS.

Turns out Paul gets back a 3k refund.

ahem.

Well, later on I thought it was funny.

Paul, however, did not.

god bless the interweb and the ability to file and receive refunds within two weeks.